A KING WANTED TO PICK THE WISEST MAN among his subjects to be his prime minister.

When the search finally narrowed down to three men, he decided to put them to the supreme test.

Accordingly, he placed them in a room in his palace, and installed a lock which was the last word in mechanical ingenuity.

The candidates were informed that whoever was able to open the door first would be appointed to the post of honour.

The three men immediately set themselves to the task.

Two of them at once began to work out complicated mathematical formulas to discover the proper lock-combination.

The third man, however, just sat in his chair doing nothing. Finally, without bothering to put pen to paper, he got up, walked to the door, turned the knob, and the door opened.

It had been unlocked all the time!

THIS IS THE SITUATION.

Nothing is locked, the door is open.

And people are pondering upon ways and means to unlock the lock. People are trying different methodologies, practising a thousand and one things, to get out. And in fact they ARE out. Unless they stop this thinking business they will not know the truth of the situation.

Man is not in bondage, only thinks so.

Because he thinks so, he is in bondage.

There is no difference between a Buddha and an ordinary man.

But the ordinary man thinks there is a difference – then there is.

You create your prisons, your locks.

And then you try to find out the ways to get out of them.

Buddhism cuts the knot with one stroke.

Buddhism says:

There is no lock, no knot to cut.

That’s what I mean when I say Buddhism cuts the knot with one stroke of the sword.

God comes only to those who are in an utter relaxation with their being.

And the person who longs for something cannot be relaxed, because that longing creates tension.

WHATEVER RUNS COUNTER

TO THE MIND AND WILL OF ORDINARY PEOPLE...

Just see the ordinary people.

But it is very difficult to find ordinary people, very difficult, because everybody has become extraordinary.

It is very difficult to find a sane person, because everybody has become insane.

Centuries of priests, mahatmas and saints have driven everybody out of his soul, out of his home.

There are only neurotic people on the earth.

Friedrich Nietzsche is reported to have said that everybody is neurotic – and if you think you are not, then that must be another kind of neurosis.

But everybody is neurotic.

What is neurosis?

Not being happy with yourself is neurosis,

not being contented with yourself is neurosis.

And then you get into turmoil and trouble.

Then you lose all peace of mind, all joy of life.

Then you exist in anguish, then you create hell for yourself.

Become ordinary.

That’s my teaching too,

if it can be called a teaching – because up to now, teachings have been to drive you towards some extraordinary goal.

But if you ask the awakened,

they have always been saying:

Just be ordinary.

Don’t strive.

Live effortlessly, live in a let-go.

And then nature takes possession of you.

Your life becomes spontaneous, you live moment-to-moment – with no ideology to follow, with no conclusions.

You live without conclusions; each moment brings its own reality and you respond to it.

And you respond out of your total being – every cell of your body and mind and soul is involved in it.

Then you never repent –

because how can you repent?

You responded totally,

so whatsoever happens is okay,

because nothing else was possible.

You had done ALL –

you responded totally,

you took the challenge.

You can’t repent if you live spontaneously.

The people who repent are the people who live through conclusions.

Then one mind says ”Do this”,

another mind says ”Do that” – because they have heard so many mahatmas and they have read so many books and they have listened to so many ideologies and so many teachers, and all those things are roaming around their minds, trying to impose themselves on the mind.

You choose one thing against something else.

If you fail, then that something else which you had denied will take revenge with a vengeance.

Just see how you are interested in the unnatural – you call it miraculous.

There are no miracles,

they have never happened,

they don’t happen,

they can’t happen.

Because the law of nature is absolute:

no exceptions are possible.

Don’t be befooled and deceived by the stories.

But one miracle is possible, and that is not against the law of nature.

But it is miraculous because it rarely happens – that’s why it is miraculous.

You can fall in tune with nature.

Immediately you become that which you are.

And suddenly all misery and all hell disappears, all nightmares disappear, you are fully awake.

And life takes a new colour, a new flavour.

That flavour is divine, but it comes out of the natural law.

For my sannyasins,

this is my message:

Live naturally, as naturally as possible.

Avoid the attraction towards the unnatural.

The desire to be special, somebody in particular, is pathological.

If you want to be special you will have to go against nature.

And to go against nature is to go against God, because God IS nature.

George Gurdjieff used to say that all the mahatmas are against God.

And I agree with him, in toto – because they all teach you to go against nature, they condemn nature.

Everything that is natural is immediately condemned.

They have made God just absolutely opposite to nature.

God is not opposite to nature,

nature has arisen out of God.

Nature is a wave of God, and it will disappear into God again.

It is not against, it CANNOT be against God.

People come to me and they ask,

”What kind of sannyasins are you creating who don’t renounce life?”

I say:

They renounce unnatural ways of life.

They don’t renounce life – why should they?

GOD has not renounced life, otherwise he would have stopped the whole business.

He still goes on creating people; he still goes on creating new flowers, new trees, new animals, new birds, new planets – he is not tired.

He has not bothered what your so-called religious people say, he doesn’t care at all.

If he had listened to your mahatmas he would have stopped creating the world – because what is the point?

He creates the world and then the mahatmas persuade people to renounce it!

He goes on creating, because he is life; he can’t help it.

It is not that he is creating; he is creativity – it is arising out of him spontaneously, naturally. It will continue.

Life has not to be renounced.

And the sannyas that taught people to renounce life was against life, against God, against the Law of Buddhas and the Law of Men.

I teach you a new sannyas: to love life, to live life, to be life.

Renounce unnatural methods and ways; be natural.

And just the opposite has been said to you up to now. They say,

”Renounce the natural and become unnatural.”

That’s why if they are against me, very much worried by me, it seems natural; their being against me seems to be very logical.

I am putting things absolutely upside-down for them. I say,

”Live life – that is true sannyas.”

They say,

”Renounce life.”

Now, their sannyas and my sannyas are not synonymous at all – polar opposites, diametrically opposite.

In this country the priest has been very important for centuries, very dominant.

He still dominates; this country is still not out of the grip of the priest.

He is against me, he goes on creating trouble for my work – because he knows if I succeed then the whole business of the priesthood is destroyed for ever.

The priest is afraid, the politician is afraid.

You have been hearing again and again that I am trying to find a place to move to.

But Delhi is very much against it – they don’t want me to have a bigger place, bigger space; they go on creating new kinds of hindrances.

And they can create them: legal, this and that – at least they can delay and they can postpone.

Their whole effort is so that somehow the world should not know about me.

The Australian TV was coming to film the ashram, they were stopped.

The BBC people had come, they had filmed half, and now they have been stopped by the government and they cannot film.

And people call this the greatest democracy in the world.

Journalists are being prevented from coming here – the world should not know what is happening here, people should not come here.

But the reason is clear, obvious.

The reason is: whatsoever they have been thinking is religion, I say is NOT religion.

In fact, what they say is religion is exactly anti-religion.

I am teaching you a new religion, a new dispensation, new in the sense that the priests have not allowed you to see it up to now – old and the ancientmost in another sense, because those who have awakened have always taught the same.

Remember these sutras of Ikkyu,

they are of immense import.

If you decide to be special then you will go against nature and you will create pathology in your consciousness and you will become perverted.

I have heard about Catholic nuns...

Now, they have been forced into a kind of celibacy. Celibacy arises, it cannot be forced.

It is a spontaneous phenomenon – if you have lived your life rightly, celibacy comes on its own.

Just as when you are fourteen sex arrives on its own, if you have lived your life rightly, nearabout forty-two celibacy starts arriving on its own. These are natural phenomena.

Celibacy has not to be taught, has not to be practised.

It will be as foolish as if you teach a seven-year-old child to practise sex – it will be as foolish and stupid.

There is no need to teach the child to practise sex, it will come in its own time – the spring will come.

But no spring lasts for ever.

The spring that is brought by the age fourteen will disappear by the age forty-two; it disappears naturally if you have lived naturally.

But if you have not lived naturally and you have been repressing your sex, then it can continue up to eighty-two.

Then dying also you will be thinking of sex.

The last thought in most people’s minds when they die is sex, nothing else.

And when they are dying they cling to sex – sex is just the opposite of death.

With sex, life starts;

with death, life ends.

So when they are dying, to avoid death they start thinking of sex.

It is very rare to find a man who dies without thinking of sex.

This is perversion, universal perversion.

Celibacy comes on its own – when the time is right, when you have lived your dreams, your illusions, and you have seen that they are illusory, one day suddenly you see something has disappeared from you.

Then you are almost puzzled by its disappearance – because it was so important up to now.

It was the center of your life, the pivot you were revolving around, and suddenly it is no more there.

Celibacy comes, has not to be practised.

One has only to live naturally and trust, and everything comes in its time.

Celibacy comes,

meditation comes,

God comes,

in its own time.

Everything comes – just as you are born and you will die, everything else also comes.

But somewhere you go perverted and then natural things don’t happen.

Then you remain in a kind of hung-up state.

Celibacy was forced on Christian nuns.

And what happened?

Do you know the story of the middle ages?

Then those nuns started having hallucinations: Jesus comes and fondles their breasts.

Now, what nonsense – Jesus coming and fondling their breasts?

This is perversion.

Jesus comes and makes love to them in the night; not only that, nuns started creating false pregnancies. Just hot air – nothing.

But their bellies would swell.

And the church became very much concerned – what to do?

Now, these poor women, they have been forced into celibacy, now they are hallucinating.

The natural desire has been crushed; now it is coming from the back door.

Then it was prohibited – because this is not moral on the part of Jesus to fondle nuns’ breasts, this doesn’t look good.

And to come in the night and make love – and he will make them pregnant!

This is not good on Jesus’ part.

So it was prohibited.

Then nuns started thinking that the Devil comes now.

Finally, if you cannot have anybody else’s support, the Devil is always available.

The Devil is such a nice guy, the last resort – when you cannot find refuge anywhere, you can find refuge in the Devil.

Then the Devil started coming.

And when the Devil comes he comes in his own ways.

Jesus must have been coming in a mild way – blessed are the meek.

When the Devil comes he comes with a fanfare. He has a forked penis – a devil is a devil.

Now, these hallucinations are ugly, unnatural.

But remember,

they are not created by the nuns,

they are created by the people who forced these poor girls to become nuns.

It was an unnatural imposition.

And why, down the ages, have religions tried to repress your sex?

For a certain very basic reason – you will be surprised to know about it, it is one of their trade secrets.

They have always been against sex. Why?

Because if sex energy is repressed then it becomes easy for a person to become interested in God.

If no other outlet is left then the whole imagination, the whole capacity to dream, becomes focussed on God.

Now, this is cheating, cheating on God.

The person is not really interested in God – just there is no other interest left, so all his interest starts flowing towards God.

He starts hallucinating, then visions of Jesus and Krishna arise.

These visions are absolutely imaginary, and if you allow the person natural sex these visions will immediately disappear.

It is as if you fast for a few days:

you will hallucinate about food.

And if you are not even allowed to hallucinate about food, then the hallucination will have to find something else as an object to focus upon. This is a trick.

If no love affair is allowed to a person he will start loving God – what else to do?

It is almost inevitable to love God then.

So religions have been using this device – deceptive, hallucinatory: stop people’s imagination about sex and then the imagination will find its own outlet.

Within ten years’ time, all that religion, that centuries-old religion, disappeared like vapour – as if it had never been there.

What happened?

The people in power started saying

”God is not.”

And the masses only repeat,

the masses only follow blindly.

Religion disappeared within ten years.

The work of centuries, maybe ten thousand years’ work, disappeared in ten years!

What kind of religion is this?

And this happened again in China.

China is one of the ancientmost countries, maybe the most ancient: has the ancientmost scriptures, the longest tradition: of religion – Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism – has created great enlightened people, has always lived in a religious way.